The poem below.

Just a note for anyone who reads the post below this one.  When I stopped writing verse over ten years ago I had been wanting to develop a form whereby rhyming, metered verse morphed into prose, and perhaps back again in one work.  This can have a humorous effect, but also, if the morph is smooth and the subject serious the effect is perhaps too uncomfortable to work.

The intention was to highlight the differences between poetry and prose, particularly at the level of meaning.  It's like the difference between singing and speaking, but not so strong.  Opera lovers will know about this, but in pure music there is no counterpart.

Writers of modern gobbledegook that avoids music, form, meter, and rhyme, and as far as I can tell, meaning arouses no curiosity in me at all.  With prose, if I don't understand it then it's probably my fault.  So if you do read the lines below please don't look for any levels of meaning but the one on top.  Thank you friends.

Unintelligent design

 Life? No mystery

The mystery of life and nature lies

With shimmering pebbles in a moorland stream.

While deeper than it seems to our poor eyes

A simple slate like lapis lazuli can gleam.

And in this river find deceitful stones

That hide their sparkle from a duller glance,

But make the eyes of others shine with lust

Of riches for the one who hones

This glassy rock to its refractive best.

But I digressed.

The wonder of a diamond stems

From qualities discovered at the hand of man;

While nature had, so many eons past

Pressed humble carbon into service as a jewel-to-be, 
it took a jeweler to add the essential polish 

The question that I really want to ask
is do you feel the need to ascribe nature’s hardest creation to a supernatural power?  Nobody has ever told you to believe that beautiful pebbles in a stream or on the beach prove intelligent design, have they?

And does the simple worm that moves only to eat and procreate speak of a ‘maker’ just because it is more complex than a stone? 

Where is the design here?  Molecules exist because atoms can combine according to strict rules – and do so whenever they meet because they must.

Even under conditions of heat and pressure where life cannot exist, complex molecules can replicate, and do so because they must.  These replicating molecules can organize themselves into ‘simple’ forms that can move and take stuff from their environment – which they do, because they are able. But the mechanisms within continue to operate because they must.

Fishes skipped on the mud and gills slowly changed to lungs – a whole new world rose from the water’s edge to be explored and exploited. Wonderful changes took place because they could. Forms changed slowly as small errors crept into the processes of replication.  Particles  

from space bombard us still and can make changes to the elementary atoms involved in DNA – the instructions for replication. 

To a very simple creature a simple change meant success or failure in the competition for resources, in the ability to recreate. The changed forms flourished because they were better, and nothing could stop them. For a while anyway.

 As creatures became very complex tiny changes had tiny effects, but over millions of years the complexities grew, and not for one second in the time it took dumb animals to evolve into even dumber humans (humorous episode) was there a need for an outside ‘designer’ to make something from nothing.  


My mother was a devout believer, and I respect the human need to fill in the gaps of understanding, and to praise something for the wonder of life (when it is wonderful) and beauty of nature (when it is beautiful).  


It is my position that simple christians are among the kindest and most selfless people by nature, and fundamentalists of all flavors among the most neurotic and dangerous.  There cannot be a single god that both groups believe in.  How can there be?

Facebook? Wass that then?

Boo, of the boo report wrote - "In recent weeks there has been a lot in the news about Facebook and an ensuing backlash against it’s unceremonious backpedal on it’s initial privacy policies.

Me, I don’t have a Facebook account. I haven’t had one for months now because it occurred to me a while back that the site is more annoying that it is useful for the following reasons... " read more here, she knows more about it than I do.

Bob commented - I’m with you, Boo. Not that this will enhance your reputation. I forgot my facebook password about 4 years ago – didn’t feel the loss. I am old enough to remember human beings of course, and even though a room full of them is one definition of hell, a better definition is a computer full of ‘people’ without gender, age, and without the ability or desire to string 4 different words into a comment.  

I have re-opened *hi* it’s only me (.blogspot) so that I can be rude to myself without alienating some nice people who look at my pictures and stuff elsewhere  I may link to decent posts and repeat my comments, in the effort to save time insulting ‘challenged’ bloggers and being nice to real people (like you I imagine) Look after yourself Boo – and pop in sometimes. 

Dreaming quietly.

A dream that is not interpreted is like a letter that is not read (the Talmud)





Thank you Rachel for waking me from a long slumber (as far as this blog is concerned), and before I forget - to anyone else who might drop in - do follow the link, hear some music I don't know about, and support a new blogger who is going places.

Back to work. The Talmud quote above is arrant nonsense. The publishers of such texts make their living by lying to simple people for their own ends.

For sure all our sleeping dreams indicate something about our inner selves - but these selves are called 'inner' because we do not know them, and to guess at what is going on in them by pondering our dreams is futile. And dangerous, especially if we consult self-serving religious texts, or other ignorant publishers.

I think Rachel is partly right when she says "
 I feel like dreams leave little clues in your head about what's coming. I don't know if its because while you're asleep your subconscious has the chance to over analyze facts without being tainted by the conscious side of your brain's interpretation... " 


Clues about what's been happening perhaps, not what's coming - the future has not happened yet. But certainly not tainted by the conscious or logical side.


In times when I have been able to wake slowly and allow recent dream clips to pass from the short-term to the long-term memory, my experience has been that logic and continuity are  rare, and that dreams are mostly short random episodes, and so garbled as to be almost impossible to recall.   The exceptions, in my case, are usually so entertaining that I  lie quietly  in the attempt to retrieve as much as possible.


Does anyone share my experience that when relaxing for sleep, thoughts often become garbled, and this is recognized by the still conscious mind - in my case usually pulling me back into a fully conscious state.  When I am thinking about whatever's on my mind at this time, the 'voice' behind the thoughts is mine.  But then the voice changes, the thoughts are no longer mine, and ALWAYS nonsense.  Fascinating - but it can be annoying if you just want to sleep.         Please friends, if you can, post something on this subject for me to reblog, or leave a long comment here.  Just to keep my mind off religious matters you understand......

This photograph was not up to much and needed slight retouching, but it's a fair record of what I saw with my own eyes, and that's the god's truth.

Cold. Had to sit downstairs, near the stove, and write this with a BIRO, (sharp intakes of breath from the kids) Seems to me for the girls, blogging is the new knitting. When I was young most good girls spent half the day knitting. Clickety click, the needles a blur, reading a book and the knitting pattern, setting the table for tea all at the same time. The scarf would grow and grow, follow her around the room out the door down to the shop and back. At 11 o'clock it would come into its own. Down to the pub she would go, remind her old man that supper was getting cold and he would follow it to his front door which, to him otherwise looked like any other front door.

Now if you girls are not chatting up some middle-aged wierdo with an avatar like the Venus de Milo (mylissa told me) you are sharing your wisdom and secrets with the connected world on line. And wonderful it is too. I was born 45 years too early - I'll need more than an avatar to get into this game.

Stealth 2000's discussion is going well. But it's a pity you have to be so polite. It is my 'umble opinion that no believer can help his\her beliefs any more than I can help my disbelief. I am a born-again atheist, and it was quite a painful delivery; loyalty to my mum, a devout believer, was evtually overcome by reason and respect for the open mind. The point is, I had no choice - I could not believe.

Any religion will succeed if enough innocent children can be trained to believe in its ideas at an early age. Of course, dear reader your religious beliefs are correct, but what about the millions of young minds locked into absurd and cruell systems that, for instance, teach that women are men's possessions? Or that they can be mutilated to ensure no pleasure from intercourse is ever possible? Unless you are born-again as an adult, and possibly sectionable (certifiable), you have most likely reached your beliefs because they were forced into your mind from an age when you could NOT question what your parent(s) asked you to believe.

If I believe anything, it is that EVIDENCE should inform our beliefs; feelings can inform our 'faith' and be respected as an important contributor to our whole being. But I use the word 'faith' to mean trust in something we cannot say is true, cannot be proved, but we feel is right. I hear some of you crying "There's more to Life and Nature than is shown by evidence" Of course there is but leave it where it is - in the world of mystery - being studied - whatever, but not the stuff of truth.

Let's all believe what we like

Mylissa's Nemeton

Thoughts, musings and other such profundities...

Friday, September 12, 2008

What makes you more right than me?

It’s a question I’ve often been asked. Most frequently when ‘passive leafleting’ for my university Pagan Society. ‘Do you honestly believe you’re right?’
Well, duh? Yes, I honestly believe that paganism is right. Some of my friends may not realise how strongly, how passionately I believe that, mainly because I tend to keep it to myself. I’m a quiet religious-nut (and no, that’s not a contradiction in terms).

Why can’t one person feel more drawn to one belief without it being ‘better’ or ‘right’? It just feels better or more right for them. And that’s fine. Nothing wrong with that. It would also mean that all religions are a valid path to The One, as a part of the whole. All religions are incomplete, imperfect ways of understanding something that is so much bigger and greater than us – something that we can never even hope to understand, let alone really conceive of completely.

But if we accept that no human can ever fully understand that powerful thing, then who has the right, who can honestly look inside themselves and say that their way is the ONLY right way?

Fallibility of the Church – its something I find very refreshing – the occasional comment in the press from an Anglican along the lines of ‘we don’t really know’ or ‘I agree with my Muslim colleague that…’
Surely this is what religion should be about - the exchange of ideas and practices with the idea of inclusion, not exclusivity or conversion being the aim.

Corfubob's comment

Falibility and Infalibility. Both concepts satisfy different needs in the human mind. A very basic division perhaps. One wants someone or something to be SURE, another wants a let-out clause, knowing that experience and learning provide valuable inputs to our human life. One of those two demonstrates intelligence it seems to me.

The big question for me is since nothing is known of ANY great deity that conforms to or originated all the physical forces that drive the universe, including spirituality, why bother to think about the different theories that the human mind has invented to come to terms with this need to understand. They are interesting for sure, these theories, but is the understanding of this need not more worthy of contemplation?